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Slide Design Workshop for Scientists, Researchers, and Science Communicators
For scientists and researchers who want to create clear, relevant slides and visual aids
Clear, engaging slides are essential to communicate your research effectively, but most scientists and researchers don’t have a design background. The result? Overloaded, text-heavy, “data-bombing” slides that can confuse and frustrate your audience and fail to highlight your key messages.
Our Slide Design Workshop is here to change that. Designed specifically for scientists, researchers, and science communicators, this workshop focuses on creating effective, visually compelling slides that support your presentation’s purpose and leave a lasting impact.
This isn’t about “pretty presentations” or turning you into a graphic designer—it’s about equipping you with practical tools and an understanding of key design principles to create slides that work. Whether you’re presenting at a conference, teaching a class, or communicating your findings to peers, this workshop will transform how you use visual aids to share your message.
Workshop highlights:
What we'll cover:
- Slide Essentials: Identify what makes slides effective (and what doesn’t).
- Visual Design Principles: Learn how layout, grids, colors, and typography influence clarity.
- Audience & Purpose: Tailor your visuals to your audience and align them with your goals.
- Tell, don’t show: Use images, icons, and diagrams to convey complex ideas simply to tell data stories.
- Our SimpleSlide process: Use our multi-step process to plan, storyboard, sketch and design better slides.
- Practical Application: Work with your own existing slides to apply new skills, and see immediate improvements.
- Group Feedback: Collaborate with fellow participants to refine and enhance your slides.
- Peer Learning: Learn from the experiences and approaches of other participants, from similar or different disciplines.
- PLUS: loads of tips, examples, tools and resources to help you continue improving your slides.
Optional: this workshop is all about learning how to communicate science and research better using visual communication and design techniques. It’s is software agnostic – you can apply these techniques to any presentation software. If all participants use PowerPoint for slide design, however, we can tailor the workshop to focus on how to apply design skills within the PowerPoint package.
Participants will leave this workshop with:
- A clear understanding of how to create visually impactful slides.
- Hands-on practice of revising existing slides and creating new slides from scratch using our simple process.
- Transferable design skills that can be used immediately to improve slides as well as other forms of visual communication, like graphical abstracts, posters and more.
- New insights from the theoretical and applied sessions, as well as from fellow particpants.
- Practical tools to improve audience engagement and ensure the main message is clear.
Flexible Formats:
This workshop works best as a full-day workshop, however we can tailor the session to our needs and the needs of your group.
- Full-Day Workshop (up to 20 participants): In-depth, hands-on training with rich discussions, peer-to-peer feedback, and lots of opportunities to revise slides, create new slides and apply learning.
- Half-Day Workshop (8-12 participants): Focused on the essentials for immediate impact, with practical activities to apply knowledge.
- Bite-sized learning: useful insights and actionable tips for larger groups – talks, Webinars and keynotes.
Want to offer slide design training as part of another workshop or training programe? Build your own workshop!
We’ve created Share Your Science to offer modular approaches to presentation and slide design skills training for scientists, researchers and communicators. Take a look at our training modules here →
Learn more
Request more information or a quote, or book a discovery call – because sometimes, it’s easier to speak.
NEW in 2025: Take a peek at Share Your Science, our dedicated platform for mastering presentation skills, created specifically for scientists, researchers, and science communicators.
Request more information or ask us for a quote
We typically schedule workshops and training 6-12 months in advance, so if you have specific dates in mind for a future event or for training planning purposes, we recommend getting in touch as early as possible. Need something at short notice? Not to worry - we often have a few days available each month for unplanned sessions.
Kind words
It was useful to think more strategically about elevator pitches and how I could create something generic for "everyday" use as well as something tailored for different situations like meetings. The opportunity to plan and share elevator pitches was good, as it gave me an idea of other styles and approaches. The detailed individual feedback was unexpected, but great.
This was a fascinating workshop! I learned so much about how I come across and how powerful it is to become more conscious about how I "show up", so that I can make the right impression. Loved the tips about reading other people's non-verbal cues, too. This has made me think twice about the best time to approach people with difficult subject. Thank you, Suzanne, for an inspiring morning!
This was a good refresher on best practice planning and design for posters. I particularly enjoyed the sessions on tools for choosing colour palettes, which I have since used in other communication materials, and the discussion about online and virtual conferences, which was an eye-opener for me during COVID. Thank you, Suzanne!
Have something different in mind?
Book a call with one of our training team and let’s explore what you are thinking about, what you need, and what we can do to help.